A family from South Africa gave up their day job to do something completely out of their comfort zone - running a vineyard nestled in leafy Kent. Sisters Jackie (38) and Caroline (36) were enthusiastic consumers of wine, but the family had no wine-making or farming experience before buying Terlingham Vineyard.
When they took over the vineyard it was farmed in a standard commercial way, using a range of artificial chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Jackie said: "We found we weren’t comfortable with what we were putting into the soil and its impact on the local plant and animal life so we took the leap to move to natural farming over seven years ago and never looked back.
"This means we don’t use any artificial pesticides, fertilisers or herbicides. We encourage the natural wild grasses and flowers that grow amongst the vines, and we welcome the bees, butterflies and spiders that accompany them. We do everything in the vineyard ourselves, by hand, and we make our wines in a traditional, low intervention way as well."
